Should PSN have been paid from the start?

Demon_Skeith

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Anyone think that PSN should have been paid from the start like Xbox live? Or did you enjoy it being free for PS3?
 
If it was payed, Sony might of been able to recover faster from being offline for a while when Anonymous hacked it in 2011, and stole members information because they earned extra money from PSN, so they can hire more people to recover PSN from being offline without losing as much money from running a free service.
 
No. I think it was a good move making first free, that way people like me that otherwise wouldn't even consider paying for its services had a free option to test the service along with the option to upgrade for a subscription anytime.

Also, the subscription service was on par with the free one, so it is not like they didn't have people paying to sustain the network. I agree with DS that if the incident of the hacker had happened with forced paid it would made people even more furious and many would have cancelled. because it was free when it happened it kind has a more positive effect, you want to think that they are charging now to use the resources to prevent something like this.
 
Absolutely not. Free online play is the reason why I chose the PS3 over XBox. So it worked for them making it free. It needs to stay that way. 
 
Even if it wasn't 'as good', I felt it offers good quality for what it was for free and the plus had very nice gaming incentives.  So having a free and paid option worked alright for Sony.  Hopefully with the obligated paid subscription route they are taking they will be able to improve and make the service even better.

Since I haven't experimented with a XBox subscription Would you care to elaborate how is it not as good?
 
I think it is better free even though it was 'hacked' and there was a big reason it was free
Because it was going to get hacked ;)
 
Demon_Skeith said:
not really, their free service hasn't been good as Xbox's paid service.
It does exactly what I need it to do, and its free. I wouldn't use the features XBox has anyways so I see no need to pay for it at all. 
 
I don't think it should have been paid from the start (I don't think it should be paid now either though... )

But going paid from the start would only have added to their disadvantages. I mean the PS3 launched nearly a year after the Xbox 360 and was significantly more expensive to boot. (Sort of inverse of what is happening now...)
Plus at the start there weren't many titles for PS3 because developers were still figuring out how to use the PS3's power. 

So if they had gone with a paid service on top of the already expensive hardware I think a lot of people would have just gone with the initially cheaper 360. (Since the free online was an incentive to pick PS3.)


In terms of being paid, I don't think it will really help that much. I mean xbox live was still hacked into (despite the fact they are paid). And no amount of money is going to be able to protect you from a group of really determined hackers. They're going to get in somehow. So even if they were completely paid at the time of the PSN hacks, the likelihood is that it wouldn't have helped. The only thing is that they'd have to do more reimbursing. 

People seem to think that just because you pay for something that you're getting better quality. But the problem is that isn't always true. Some things that are paid are shit. But since someone paid for them, they don't want to admit it was shit. (Because then they'd have to admit they wasted their money.)

Furthermore, just because something goes from free to paid doesn't mean that quality will improve. And in this case, all Sony has done is moved online play from the free side to behind the paywall. (Pulling a microsoft move.)

And even when PSN does go paid, it won't fix anything if your connection to Sony's servers isn't very good. (If that's why you had troubles on PSN before, that's not likely to improve since it's a connection issue from your ISP to Sony's servers. Might have nothing to do with Sony at all, but rather your ISP.)
Plus I highly doubt that even when PSN is paid things will really improve much. I imagine things will stay pretty much like they are now simply because Sony won't have to do anything to improve. They're at a comfortable place with plenty of good PR (going against a company who's PR is pretty bad now and really not improving very much). So there really isn't any incentive for them to improve. Especially since, once you pay, they already have your money.  


And regarding PSN vs XBL... I used to see a lot of people say XBL was so much better (I don't see that line trotted out much anymore), but not a single one of them could ever offer an actual reason for it. They always only ever said shit like: "because it's paid" or "because it is". (Those aren't reasons... those are your opinions. Two very different things. If you want to make claims something is uniformly better then you need to provide some very good reasons/evidence for it.)
 
GSquadron said:
I think it is better free even though it was 'hacked' and there was a big reason it was free
Because it was going to get hacked ;)
All systems are inherently hackable.

That includes Microsoft's entire service. Windows Azure went down on Feb. 29 for the leap year, for instance.

Deal with it.
 
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